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Comment by Veen | Hacker News Reader

If this were true, how would you explain the recent improvements to Safari on the iPad that make it as capable as desktop Safari. Until last year Google Docs did not work in Safari on the iPad. Now it works very well indeed. The same is true of most web apps.

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This particular move takes something that is possible in web applications today and makes it not possible in the future (offline capable frontend-only applications), making the gap between native applications and browser applications further, so developers who need to build apps that works offline on iPhone, will only be able to use Apples own technologies for doing so, in a non-cross-platform way. Which in general, is what Apple always been favoring.

Google Docs doesn't really work offline, so it's not impacted by this change. Could also be a change of heart from Apple, since their stance on web applications have changed before.

It could also be exactly what they say it is: a way to prevent the abuse of local storage for tracking.

People who want to track users will always find a way to do so, it's a endless cat-and-mouse game. Now they will just use cookies instead... The only way to win this is to legislate away the freedom to track users by using privacy-invasive methods. That's the only way that will work long-term. But that'll make half of the internet industry disappear, along with it's shareholders, so it's unlikely to happen.

> People who want to track users will always find a way to do so, it's a endless cat-and-mouse game. Now they will just use cookies instead...

Isn't the new policy for local storage being copied from an existing policy for cookies? How can they switch to cookies?

> Now they will just use cookies instead

In the linked article it actually mentions that this policy is being widened from cookies to the rest of script-writable storage.

Arbitrary government rules are never the solution for issues.

Now I'm not a native English speaker, but seems "arbitrary" means "determined by chance, whim, or impulse, and not by necessity, reason, or principle". Introducing a law to protect peoples privacy would not be arbitrary, especially since most countries have a due process for introducing laws.

It's both.

They could restrict these APIs to "installed" web apps via the web app manifest file, if they were to adopt that. Maybe they will in the future, but for now they've just made web apps far less powerful.

> Google Docs doesn't really work offline

It actually works quite well offline

This is a great point with a simple explanation: How good Safari was on iPad was irrelevant before mouse support. Before mouse support, we had apps made with UIKit, which is a touch-first app framework, competing with web apps, which are keyboard-and-mouse first. So UIKit apps won, because UIKit apps are better for touch. With mouse support, that situation becomes exactly inverted: In UIKit apps, the keyboard and mouse are secondary, so web apps have the advantage in being keyboard-and-mouse first.

So now that web apps have the advantage, at least when a keyboard and mouse are attached to the iPad, Apple is going to be seeking to tip the scales back in native apps favor.

We’re all speculating about Apple’s motivation, but none of us really knows why Apple made its decision. Perhaps it’s best to focus on the trade-offs—privacy vs. functionality—and not the speculative Kremlinology.

Respectfully, no. Learning software is a big investment in time and effort. Since I'm on Apple's platforms, because I think they're the best compromise for running the software I want to run, I am going to continue to speculate their reasoning to try to predict which software will be successful on their platforms in the future, because that's how I choose where to invest my time and effort.

I respect you have some other motivations here, but I'm not doing this for fun. I'm doing this because it's important to how I spend my most important resources: my time and effort. So no, I'm not going to stop speculating, the mere idea is laughable. Like buying an individual stock while having no opinion of what direction the company might take in the future.

Of course you are free to speculate, but my point was that we lack evidence of Apple’s motivations that would help us to make predictions of any value. All we can do is tell a plausible story, and without evidence your story is no more likely to be true than mine.

> In UIKit apps, the keyboard and mouse are secondary

Apple just added new APIs to support these.

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